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Why Lost Ice Means Lost Hope for an Inuit Village

The only road to Rigolet, Labrador, is the ice. But climate change is making that ice vanish, and the mental health impact runs deep.

ON SEA ICE NEAR RIGOLET, Labrador — Leaning over the handlebars with one knee up on the seat, Derrick Pottle commanded his snowmobile between rocks and sheets of gray sea ice before stopping suddenly at the mouth of a bay.

“It’s open,” Mr. Pottle said, turning off his machine. Ten yards away, the ice had cracked and opened a dark hole in the water that made it impossible to drive across the inlet.

It was Jan. 7, unusually late in the season for Mr. Pottle’s first trip to his winter cabin — a few hours drive by snowmobile from his hometown, Rigolet — over what should have been more than 60 miles of frozen trails and solid ice.

Rigolet, a town on Canada’s eastern edge, has no roads leading in or out. Lakes, rivers and streams, if they freeze over, become what the town’s 300 residents call their “highway” — a lifeline to nearby towns and places to fish, trap and hunt.

But as the climate has warmed, these ice roads have become unreliable, breeding isolation, and, some studies suggest, elevated mental stress.

Mr. Pottle, a 61-year-old Inuit hunter, surveyed the land and water. In a lifetime in the north, he had traveled thousands of miles through blizzards, shot seven polar bears and fallen through sea ice. But this was an unfamiliar landscape.

Derrick Pottle, a lifelong resident of Labrador, on sea ice near Rigolet.Livia Albeck-Ripka/The New York Times

He strode a few yards toward the hole in the ice before turning back to his snowmobile. Pausing, he put his gloves back on his tattooed hands, revved the engine and took off through the spruce trees, searching for another route.

A melted highway

Just four decades ago, Mr. Pottle said, he would have crossed the same inlet over ice more than a foot thick in November. Since then, Labrador’s coastal ice has declined by almost 40 percent, making travel treacherous, if possible at all.

“It’s a volatile place climatically,” said Robert Way, a postdoctoral fellow at Memorial University of Newfoundland who studies Labrador’s permafrost. This climatic sensitivity, combined with Arctic amplification — a feedback loop created when reflective ice melts to reveal dark ocean water — Dr. Way said, had more than doubled the region’s rate of warming compared with the rest of the world.

“And it’s only going to get worse,” he said.

Shrubs that thrive in warmer temperatures have sprouted across the tundra and snow cover has diminished, Dr. Way said. Without the ice highway, hunters like Mr. Pottle often have no choice but to drive their snowmobiles through the wilderness. “You can’t get in or out of these communities,” he said. “We’re almost like prisoners.”

Attempting the trip to his cabin earlier that winter, Mr. Pottle struck a rock, flipped his snowmobile and had to return home. The next time, the wind was relentless. Mr. Pottle said gales were becoming stronger. “These are the kind of conditions that can kill you,” he said. “The wind can get so severe, you can’t get warm.”

While scientists have not established a link between Labrador’s wind strength and climate change, another recent study corroborated locals’ observations. “When it’s something you’ve relied on for your safety, you remember,” Dr. Way said.

Deeper distress

The Inuit have a word for changes they are seeing to their environment: uggianaqtuq. It means “to behave strangely.” But it is not just the weather that’s in turmoil.

For the past decade, Ashlee Cunsolo, a public health researcher and director of the Labrador Institute of Memorial University, has seen the disorienting effects of climate change take a toll on the mental health of people along the coast. “When you’re in situations when you’re deeply reliant on the environment, even subtle alternations can have huge ripple effects,” she said.

In hundreds of interviews conducted between 2009 and 2014 across five indigenous communities in the Nunatsiavut region of Labrador, including Rigolet, Dr. Cunsolo and her team found that the melted ice, shorter winters and unpredictable weather made people feel trapped, depressed, stressed and anxious, and, in some cases, led to increased risk of substance abuse and suicidal thoughts.

In one town, a woman told Dr. Cunsolo’s team that not being able to get on the land made her feel like her spirit was dying. In another, a man said, “Inuit are people of the sea ice. If there is no more sea ice, how can we be people of the sea ice?”

Mr. Pottle says wild food makes up at least 95 percent of his diet.Livia Albeck-Ripka/The New York Times

When Dr. Cunsolo first visited Rigolet in the winter of 2009-10, air temperature in the region was an average of 12.8 degrees Fahrenheit above normal. It barely snowed, and there was severe wind and freezing rain. Finally, at the end of January, the ice froze over — choppy, sharp and ten weeks late. By April, six to eight weeks earlier than usual, it was gone.

In part, the warm winter happened because of a natural atmospheric process called negative Arctic oscillation, but the magnitude, Dr. Way said, could only be explained by a century of warming. What Dr. Cunsolo’s research revealed to be the “largest climatic and environmental shift in living memory” in Rigolet made clear to her what had until that winter played out at a slower rate.

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“A flood happens, or a Hurricane Katrina happens, and people say, ‘Oh, that makes sense that people are traumatized,’” Dr. Cunsolo said. When people “are exposed to this ongoing environmental stress, day after day, month after month, that has a tremendous impact.”

With less time spent outside, people said they felt “stuck” and “isolated” and some reported increased drug and alcohol use, and domestic violence. Men accustomed to providing for their families and communities by hunting and trapping, Dr. Cunsolo’s research found, were particularly at risk.

“Hunting and sharing food is not just a way to meet your basic needs, but is part of the fabric of social life,” said Dr. Laurence J. Kirmayer, director of McGill University’s social and transcultural psychiatry unit, who was not involved in the research. “You can find another way to get your calories, but in so doing, you may be losing companionship, solidarity and your sense of self.”

Dr. Kirmayer said mental health also depended on eating local food because of an Inuit conception of self, tied to the environment, which he described as “ecocentric.” There is “a sense in which the food ‘becomes you,’” he said.

Mr. Pottle described hunting and eating wild food — which, by his own accounting, makes up at least 95 percent of his diet — like seal, moose, and salmon, as his identity. “It’s who I am,” he said. “It’s something I’ve done all my life.”

There are no roads leading in or out of Rigolet. The ice — if it freezes — is the “highway.” But with climate change, it is disappearing, putting an at-risk community under further strain.

‘Another form of colonization’

In 1968, when Derrick Pottle was 11 years old, he and his family moved from Rigolet to Happy Valley-Goose Bay under a federal government program that relocated thousands of indigenous Canadians from remote communities.

“Goose Bay was a very, very bad place to be an Inuk,” Mr. Pottle said, recalling systemic abuse and racism. At school, he was forbidden from speaking his native language, Inuktitut, and after the move, he said, his parents became alcoholics “overnight.”

Climate change provokes a similar sense of displacement, experts say, particularly for hunters. An unpredictable environment means disempowerment. “It’s like another form of colonization,” Dr. Cunsolo said.

Harlie Pottle at Double Mer, near Rigolet. “The future kind of scares me,” she said, “just thinking about how we’re going to survive.”Livia Albeck-Ripka/The New York Times

Experts say that while the stress wrought by climate change may not, on its own, cause mental health problems, it can rekindle past trauma, worsening existing issues with substance abuse, depression and suicide.

“We went through some horrible injustices in my family,” Mr. Pottle said, describing how he, too, had at first turned to alcohol but has not touched a drink in 39 years. His brother, he said, was unable to cope. “I know in my heart he committed suicide.”

Harlie Pottle, Mr. Pottle’s 18-year-old niece, said driving her snowmobile across the frozen sea ice comforted her in difficult moments. “The land is part of me. It felt like I was supposed to be there,” she said. “The future kind of scares me, just thinking about how we’re going to survive.”

A hint of things to come

When Dr. Cunsolo first started researching the impact of climate change on mental health, she said there was a misconception that indigenous people — often on the front lines of rising oceans, extreme heat and melting ice — would be the only ones affected.

But studies in Australia showed how farmers struggled with extreme weather, and that in Ghana, withered crops, dried-up wells and the “loss of beauty” made people sad.

“We weren’t around when the asteroid wiped out dinosaurs, but now we have humans in the 21st century who are trying to deal with a change to the world which is unprecedented,” said Glenn Albrecht, a philosopher and former professor at Murdoch University in Australia. He said that language needed to evolve to articulate such profound loss.

After witnessing the devastation at Australia’s strip mines, Dr. Albrecht coined the word solastalgia: “a form of homesickness one experiences when one is still at home.” (It comes from the Latin solacium, meaning “comfort” and the ancient Greek root algia meaning “pain.”)

Dr. Albrecht said the anxiety people felt about climate change was perfectly rational. What’s disordered, he said, “is the world that is causing you to feel that way.”

The experience of those on the front lines, Dr. Cunsolo said, was merely an indication of what was coming. “All humans, whether we want to admit it or not, are impacted by the natural environment,” she said.

Mr. Pottle, for his part, is learning, painfully, to adapt.

Blocked by the open water of the bay, he aimed his snowmobile along a path of low willow seedlings and mosses. Miles on, he would reach the tundra, where, in the distance, his red cabin sat against a white backdrop of sky and land.

There are no roads leading in or out of Rigolet. The ice — if it freezes — is the “highway.” But with climate change, it is disappearing, putting an at-risk community under further strain.

Correction November 27, 2017

An earlier version of this article gave the incorrect age for Derrick Pottle when he moved to Happy Valley-Goose Bay from Rigolet as a child. He was 11 years old, not nine.